Status Updates From Harlem Shuffle

AC and the Dumas Club

FIVE four days to come up with a plan

Remember me,This is your job now, Remember me or no one else will. At times it seemed the grief was powerful enough to shut down the world, cut off the juice, stop the earth from spinning. It was not. The world proceeded in its mealy fashion, the lights stayed on, the earth continued to spin and its seasons ravaged and renewed in turn.

Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn’t help one another we’d be lost out there.

You could never know what was going on with other people, but their private selves were
never far away. The city was one teeming, miserable tenement and the wall between you and everybody else was thin enough to punch through.

They broke the window again. He replaced it. They smashed it four times and four times he replaced it. Was he a monument to hope, or to insanity? He was a man grasping after an impossible solution. How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?

What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.

Maybe it wasn’t envelopes the city ran on, but grudges and payback.

To whom do we give our allegiance? Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope—or whom he gives it to?”

Perhaps on the street above, the big black letters rearranged themselves into new names and words, and ten thousand blinking lights expounded in an unseen, after-hours performance. Spelling out philosophical declarations. Statements of universal truth. Cries for help
and understanding. And maybe among them, an affirmation intended for him and him alone: a perfect message of hate, inscribed upon the city itself.

Like the row of buildings across the street—other people and the years tugging them away from the original plans. The city took everything into its clutches and sent it every which way. Maybe you had a say in what direction, and maybe you didn’t.

No New Frontier stretched before him, endless and bountiful—that was for white folks—but this new land was a few blocks at least and in Harlem a few blocks was everything. A few blocks was the difference between strivers and crooks, between opportunity and the hard scrabble.